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Were you Charlie?

Praise to all the newspapers who had the guts to reprint the
Charlie Hebdo cartoons on their front page. There were far too few of them. A
couple of hours after the horrible attack in Paris, I was still hoping for a Charlie
Effect: “If you kill someone for a cartoon, you will see it reprinted the next
day in a thousand newspapers”. Except for a couple of courageous European
newspapers, that hope proved forlorn. In the past week, a number of excuses
have cropped up for not showing the images.

Why add fuel to the
fire and provoke Muslims once again? Why distribute the very same cartoons for
which so much blood has been shed already? Do you really want more victims on
your conscience?

This line of reasoning sounds conciliatory and soothing, but
is in fact perverse and cowardly. We should not print the cartoons because they offend Muslims, but despite the fact that they do.

First and foremost, those cartoons are news. They were the direct occasion and motive for a horrible murderous raid, as
the perpetrators themselves took care to point out. Newspaper readers have the
right to know precisely which pencil strokes provoked so much hatred as to
necessitate a suicidal blood-soaked revenge.

By choosing not to reprint the cartoons in any form, despite
their overwhelming news value, newspapers are capitulating to terrorism. The demand
of the terrorists, that their prophet shall be neither depicted nor mocked by
anyone, ever, is thereby fulfilled.

But why insist on reprinting
them everywhere? Those cartoons were spreading like wildfire on social media
anyway. For anyone who wants to see them, they are just a few clicks away. We
can defend other people’s right to blaspheme without exercising that right ourselves.
Freedom of expression is a right, not a duty. As The Guardian wrote in a
collective editorial:
“defending the right of someone to say whatever they like does not oblige you
to repeat their words.”

This attitude is a more subtle form of cowardice. If just a
few newspapers have the courage to show the cartoons, only they will bear the
brunt of religious extremism. The fewer people show them, the higher the hazard
for the courageous. And if no-one shares them, the terrorists have won.

The fear of newspaper editors to show the cartoons is
understandable. The Hamburger
Morgenpost had its offices firebombed after reprinting them. The Turkish secular
newspaper Cumhuriyet
Daily has received countless death threats after announcing they would reprint
some of the cartoons. In the end, the actual blasphemous material (the
depiction of the prophet) ended up as a small black-and-white image in the column
section.

Vous êtes Charlie?
More people should’ve been Charlie in 2006, when the satirical magazine was
among the few having the guts to reprint the Danish cartoons. Back then, this was
widely condemned as an act of needless “provocation”, and got the magazine
involved in a lawsuit for racism (a preposterous accusation). Because of the
cowardice of other media, a small and vulnerable satirical magazine became the lonely focal point of all religious hatred.

What we needed back then, and still need, is an avalanche of
cartoons depicting the prophet. Not to deliberately offend devout Muslims, but
to desensitize the extremists. That strategy proved effective with other religions, who have
learned the hard way that, in a free society, anyone has the right to criticize
and mock their beliefs. Sadly, even today, most major American news outlets refuse
to reprint the cartoons, out of misplaced ‘respect’ for religious sensibilities.
Sure they defend the right to blaspheme.
It’s just that they’d rather have someone else standing in the firing line.

But how can you force anyone
to endorse offensive and racist cartoons? There is no duty to offend. This call
for ‘solidarity’ amounts to browbeating everyone into further insulting an
already oppressed religious minority. That is itself an infringement of free
speech.

Reprinting a cartoon out of solidarity with the victims of a hate crime, as a way of affirming their right to have published it, does not mean that you
endorse its message. No-one forces anyone to like the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. If you are a journalist and you think a cartoon is highly offensive, you would still reprint it if newsworthy, if only to show how offensive it is. When
Gerald Scarfe published a cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu in the Sunday Times
last year, reminiscent of the ancient blood libel charge, Jewish newspapers also
reprinted the cartoon. Were they therefore endorsing its anti-Semitic message?
Of course not. The cartoon was just news, and they were discussing it in the only sensible way: by showing it.

By the accounts of some apologists who refuse to show them,
you are almost led to believe that the avenged Charlie Hebdo cartoons were vile, racist, xenophobic drivel. In order to rationalize their own cowardice in the face
of religious extremism, many newspapers now pretend that the drawings are so terribly offensive
that it would hurt their readers' eyes to see them. This is to exaggerate the sensibilities of even most devout Muslims. The charge of racism is a particularly ridiculous one, given
the explicitly
left-wing, anti-racist orientation of Charlie Hebdo. It is also completely irrelevant,
as there is no indication at all that the Paris attacks were in retaliation for
alleged racism. The murderers, as they made abundantly clear at the crime scene,
were avenging the prophet Mohammed, not any alleged Arab "race" (they did not even share
the same ethnic background).

This is one of the persistent ironies of religious
apologists on the Left: some would rather slander
their own (dead) allies as "racists" than incriminate a certain
opium of the people. ‪They
are staining the memory of those brave souls in Paris.

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Comments

Anonymous said…

The silly pop culture and media response to the violence of the clearly mentally ill young men is a good example of the pathos and bathos and confabulation/disassociation that hysterical fear responses drive.

Sadly, while the hysterical fear response sells media advertisers, it is a tragic obstacle to real problem-solving. But the only problem the human brain is capable of addressing it's it's own over-wrought, and delusional, fear response of the moment, of course. Too bad...but animal nature..